Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago

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00:18. Stage 1-1
02:37. Stage 1-2
04:36. Stage 1-3
06:37. Stage 1-4
08:55. Stage 1-5
11:03. Stage 1-6
12:30. Stage 1-7
15:21. Stage 2-1 (start of Second Loop)

Gradius is one of the most famous shmup franchises of all time. When the original Gradius first came out in arcades in 1985, it was a big success especially in Japan and there wasn't anything else quite like it. It has a unique powerup system which became a staple of the series, increasing your ship's power while allowing you to make strategic decisions. It also features some pretty advanced level design for its time and some memorable parts like the Moai heads in Stage 3.

However, there's one other thing this game started that's quite infamous and it's Gradius Syndrome. Basically, if you die, you're screwed because you lose all your power ups. Recovering is almost impossible, especially in later stages of the first loop and beyond. It is even worse in some other games in the series, most notably the arcade version of Gradius III and its notorious difficulty.

Because of the Gradius Syndrome, my goal was to No-Miss the first loop and I managed to pull it off. This took me longer that I would like to admit because I'm also much worse at horis than I am at vertical shmups. Thankfully, the loops here are pretty short. The hardest stages are Stages 3, 4, and 7. Stages 4 and 7 are aggravating because of the enemies that come from behind on the ceiling and the floor. I did not last long in the second loop.

The double shot was very helpful in Stage 4 to take out the hatches and also in Stage 5 with the weird tentacle brain enemies, but I stuck with the lasers otherwise. Speaking of the lasers, they have a larger hitbox than the line suggests, which is something I exploited as much as possible. Also, I took 2 speedups, which made my ship harder to control in tighter areas but it did help me to be more aggressive. Speedups also affect how far your options are spread out, which improves the effectiveness of your laser.

I played this game via the Gradius Collection in PPSSPP. This is a excellent compilation developed by M2 that was released on the PSP in 2006 in North America. It features I, II, III, IV, and Gaiden all in one collection. You can tweak the settings quite a bit, as you can tweak the slowdown, the hitboxes, overall difficulty, and whether you want pickups to be activated automatically, semi-auto, or manually. I played it on the arcade presets outside of using semi-auto pickup activation for the minor quality of life improvement. Automatic pickup activation was already a thing by Parodius Da! so these options were not new to this compilation by any means, and Gokujo Parodius added semi-auto. This port feels extremely accurate to the arcade original, as to be expected from M2.

Special thanks to @exmosquito, @Shepardus, and @dumplechan because their videos of this game were quite helpful as I was practicing for my clear of this game.

#gradius #shmups #psp #konami #retrogaming #arcadegames